WP Engine is constant to put money into Superior Customized Fields (ACF) and with the launch of ACF 6.2, we’ve acquired some actual goodness to share at present!

Bidirectional Relationship Help

In the event you work with ACF lengthy sufficient, you finally encounter a use case the place you wish to wire up one thing often called a bidirectional relationship between two fields. Because of this when a content material editor modifications a relationship area towards one piece of content material, it mechanically updates the connection within the different course for the linked piece of content material.

If that sounds a bit complicated, let me offer you an instance!

Say you may have an internet site that showcases and ranks the highest 100 movies from the best decade of cinema, aka the 90s! (Bonus content material right here from our DE{CODE} session the place we stroll by way of this mission for actual!). 

On this web site, you wish to create relationships between the completely different movies and their administrators. For “causes,” you may have each movies and administrators arrange as separate customized publish varieties.

What you wish to do now could be that each time a brand new movie is added, and the director is chosen, (from a relationship area) then over on the related director, the movie is mechanically added as effectively. This two-way connection saves vital editorial time, holding the connection between the 2 content material items (movie and director) mechanically in sync.

Whereas ACF has lengthy been used for this form of factor,  it has, till now, required both customized code or using a third-party plugin. ACF customers have for a few years been asking for native assist, and with model 6.2 this week, we lastly have it!

Try the video under for a way simple it’s to arrange.

If you need a deeper look, this current ACF Chat Friday’s session with Iain Poulson offers you a strong walkthrough of the way it works!

BTW, if you happen to agree with me that Steven Spielberg’s Hook is one of the best movie of the 90s, right here’s a coupon for 4 months of WP Engine internet hosting totally free! 

Choices Web page Registration UI

Carrying on with the theme of natively enabling common performance, model 6.2 of ACF PRO enables you to register, configure, and handle your customized Choices Pages throughout the UI. Once more, that is one thing customers beforehand relied on customized code for.

Choices Pages are an unknown characteristic for some ACF customers, so let me break them down for you. Once more, with our superior 90s movie web site, we wish to embrace a easy top-of-the-page call-to-action banner on the entrance finish for customers to vote for his or her favourite movie.

Now we wish to edit the textual content and button of this CTA and toggle it on and off based mostly on the allowed voting window. A handful of textual content and boolean fields make this pretty easy, however this CTA bar is site-wide, not tied to a selected publish or web page. It’s these sorts of site-wide fields that belong in choices pages.

All the pieces from CTA banners to web site colours, fonts, and different web site settings might be delivered to the WordPress person by way of a number of customized Choices Pages. I’ve talked to many businesses through the years that present their purchasers with wealthy world configuration choices through Choices Pages.

Evidently, what as soon as needed to be performed by way of code, can now be performed within the app UI itself. Try this brief demo under.

The Choices Pages characteristic is simply obtainable in ACF PRO.

And Extra!

The 6.2 launch is filled with different options, enhancements, and bug fixes. Try the launch publish from the crew and the total changelog to study extra, and take a look at the video under to study extra about a number of the new, and possibly lesser identified, issues you are able to do with ACF.

Develop your WordPress and ACF Expertise

ACF is central to the way in which so many construct with WordPress, and our developer advocate crew is investing an increasing number of into occasions and content material to allow you to succeed. If you wish to develop as a WordPress skilled, try our Builders group. Loads of ACF goodness is ready there for you!